| An Efficient Algorithm for Reconstructing Anisotropic Spread Cost Surfaces After Minimal Change to Unit Cost Structures
ABSTRACT Anisotropic cost spreading operations are frequently used to find optimal routes across a landscape. These optimal routes often represent minimum cost paths for new roads, but they can also be used to represent the paths followed by a growing wildfire, the routes followed by wildlife moving through an area, and so on. Recently, researchers and other GIS users have developed sophisticated analysis procedures that make use of repeated anisotropic cost spreading operations. Frequently, these multiple cost spreading operations only differ from one another by relatively minor changes to the unit cost maps that comprise the majority of each anisotropic cost spreading operations’ inputs. Anisotropic cost spreading procedures are highly computer intensive and when applied to large databases, can require a considerable amount of time to produce solutions. However, if a particular cost spreading problem is only a minor variation of a previously solved problem, it stands to reason that a solution to the new problem can be derived relatively easily by modifying the existing solution to the old problem. The purpose of this study is to develop a cost spreading solution algorithm that can be applied to problems that are slight modifications of previously solved problems, and test and evaluate this new procedure relative to standard anisotropic cost spreading procedure under a variety of circumstances. |